Emily > Emily's Quotes

“The man was probably Jesus and he was probably praying, but I chose to ignore those things—you didn’t have to be religious to love the sun and the way it felt against your skin, to have a moment so beautiful and pure that it brought you to your knees.”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“A classic trait of girlhood - forever confusing your desires with that of an older man's.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I feel very, very alone."

"We're all alone, Reva," I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“To be clear, the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-acceptance.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Feeling comfortable in my body isn't entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It's about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk -- in fact, quite the contrary.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Even back then I understood the real purpose of literature. I didn’t want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.”
― Heather King, Parched

“When I was a child, my mom used to tell me that life was like a game, and sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do in order to do the things that you did want to do. I always thought this was strange advice. I only ever had brief and fleeting ideas for things I did want to do, but mostly I felt completely overwhelmed by possibilities, and then just went down the list saying, no, no, no, not that, not that until I was playing this idiots game of racking up things I was doing that I didn’t want to do in service of some imaginary thing I might one day stumble upon.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“This could be my life if I let it. I could make all kinds of plans and take care of myself. I could apologize to my mom, let her know that I've been depressed since I lost my boyfriend and my job and all my fake friends during a time when I probably should have been medicated (but not blaming her or anything), but that I'm trying to work on it.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“You can't complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren't trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“This must be what it means to be an animal, to look at another and say, I am so much that other thing that we are part of one another. Here is my skin. Here yours. Beneath the moon, we pile inside the warm cave, becoming one creature to save our warmth. We breathe together and dream together. This is how it has always been and how it will continue to be. We keep each other alive through an unbroken lineage of togetherness.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“Shay had been taught that God was too pure to look upon sin. And Shay wondered, then, what on earth there was left to look at.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Mercury

“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things